She Blogged By Nighthttp://shebloggedbynight.com
Mon, 08 May 2017 18:06:33 +0000en-UShourly137047056S.O.B. (1981)http://shebloggedbynight.com/2017/s-o-b-1981/
http://shebloggedbynight.com/2017/s-o-b-1981/#commentsSat, 15 Apr 2017 04:53:31 +0000http://shebloggedbynight.com/?p=10337Blake Edwards was mad at Hollywood. He'd gone through some things, man, and now he had a whole lot of beef with the entire cynical, money-grubbing, back-stabbing lot. In 1981, after making a comeback with mega-hits The Pink Panther and 10, he started on a nasty little poison pen letter to Tinseltown called S.O.B., short for "standard operational bullshit," otherwise known as the way Hollywood always works. Continue reading

Blake Edwards was mad at Hollywood. He’d gone through some things, man, and now he had a whole lot of beef with the entire cynical, money-grubbing, back-stabbing lot. In 1981, after making a comeback with mega-hits The Pink Panther and 10, he started on a nasty little poison pen letter to Tinseltown called S.O.B., short for “standard operational bullshit,” otherwise known as the way Hollywood always works. S.O.B. is a tale of Felix Farmer (Richard Mulligan), the biggest, most profitable producer in the industry, and his suicidal despair at the terrible reviews his sickly sweet family film Night Wind, starring his beloved wife Sally Miles (Julie Andrews), has gotten in previews.

Still alive despite his best attempts, an impromptu orgy in his living room gives him a eureka moment that resurrects his will to live: he’ll turn Night Wind into soft porn, have his demure ex-wife go nude, and rake in the profits. As this plan gains steam, there’s a lot of yelling, panic, suicide, attempted murder and broken bones, random topless women, racist jokes, angry executives, and even some dick-punching. It’s just another week in L.A.

S.O.B. (1981) is based on Edwards’s experience earlier in his career, about a decade before his biggest successes, but there’s also a scene based on the old chestnut about Barrymore’s corpse going walkabout with his drunken pals, and a finale that gives a big warm nod to The Loved One, an equally nasty but superior satire of Hollywood, mostly because it deals with a Hollywood-adjacent industry rather than taking Hollywood head on.

This all takes place at the fictional Capitol Studios. The studio in Hail, Caesar! was the similarly named Capitol Pictures.

It probably helped that The Loved One, when it referenced real people, did so quietly. S.O.B. makes absolutely no bones about who it’s sending up. Robert Vaughn is studio owner David Blackman, a character based heavily on Robert Evans, though as Time noted when the film was released, there’s some of MGM’s James Aubrey in there, too. Blackman is married to the beautiful Mavis (Marisa Berenson), an Ali McGraw surrogate, and who is carrying on an affair with hunky Sam Marshall (David Young), a.k.a. Steve McQueen, same initials and everything.

The film that Mavis pushes to get Sam the lead role is probably a reference to The Great Gatsby, which Bob Evans had bought the rights to in the early 1970s. In The Kid Stays in the Picture, Evans talks at length about how he thought McQueen would be a… great Gatsby. (Sorry. Maybe.) That is, he thought Steve would be perfect for the role until he got Truman Capote’s treatment of Gatsby, at which point he told his wife Ali, and I quote, “Fuck Gatsby. Make The Getaway with McQueen. Together you’ll make it the hottest movie of the year.” That did not turn out well, either on the relationship front or on the cinematic adaptation of Jim Thompson novels front, though I understand I may be in the minority of opinion on the latter.

Also appearing in barely disguised caricature is Loretta Swit as the vile and hated Joyce Haber, though she’s wearing dippy kind of high-necked thing that’s really more Rona Barrett’s style, but Rona can’t have been more than a tiny bit of inspiration here. Shelly Winters, one of the best members of this ensemble cast, is a sort of Sue Mengers type, very shrewd, very classy, extremely manipulative. Mengers was reportedly livid at the portrayal.

Mengers and others may have been upset, but their treatment is tame compared to the vicious subplot involving the corpse of Burgess Webster, an old character actor who died suddenly on the beach outside Felix’s home, and no one, save his loyal dog, has noticed. The film periodically cuts back to his body and his sad dog, played by “Troubles,” who is about as heartbreaking as a doggie can be.

S.O.B. is dated, of course, especially with regard to the sexuality of several characters, with the exception of Irving. The good doctor spends all his time needling Ben (Robert Webber, seen above, pointing accusingly), and it provides some of the best moments. When Ben gets upset at Irving calling him nervous, he replies, “Don’t get sore; some of my best friends are nervous.” Preston is by far the best part of the movie, and even if the premise sounds terrible to you, I highly recommend it if for no reason than to see Preston try out his bitchy gay character a year before Victor/Victoria.

The dead Webster is played by Blake Edwards standby Herb Tanney, who frequently took a pseudonym based on his characters (Stiffe Tanney here, Sherloque Tanney in Victor/Victoria, etc.) He’s fine for the little he does, but it might have been nice to use some actual older character actors in this film to more firmly root it in Hollywood. Not necessarily roman à clef appearances as in Sunset Blvd., but older actors a la Singin’ in the Rain, used as a way to subtly break the fourth wall. Though, to be fair, SitR didn’t call attention to actors like Mae Clarke and Snub Pollard and Jack Hendricks, and wasn’t exactly kind to the late-silent and early-talkie eras, despite pretending to be; maybe SitR is a better example of the hypocrisy S.O.B. rails against than it is a fellow traveler along Sour Grapes Highway.

Then again, is really sour grapes when you have a legitimate complaint? In S.O.B., Felix buys the rights to Night Wind after the studio pulls a few fast ones. Something very similar happened not only in S.O.B. but with S.O.B.:

Amid charges of ”excessive expenditures” and countercharges of ”lame excuses,” Paramount, distributor of ”S.O.B.,” has canceled a $225,000 press junket for the film, which will open in 640 theaters next Wednesday. Mr. Edwards, writer, director and producer of ”S.O.B.,” which stars his wife, Julie Andrews, and William Holden, is putting on and paying for the junket.

You’d think that Edwards would have known he would ruffle some Tinseltown feathers, but when he made S.O.B., largely based on his miserable experience filming Darling Lili for Paramount, he had no intention of working with Paramount in the first place. But at the last minute, Lorimar severed ties with its distribution company and partnered with Paramount, who then began to make a huge fuss about the film, proving Edwards right, though studio execs (and often the public) never see it that way. We’re a country full of people who claim to love individuality and rebels and non-conformity, but the second someone seems like they’re “causing trouble,” everyone abandons them for fear of suffering some kind of consequence.

Which, obviously, is a main theme in S.O.B.

S.O.B. was the first film I remember ever really wanting to see. I was a cynical 8-year-old, apparently. When I wasn’t allowed to because, y’know, dick-punching, I lobbied to see Victor/Victoria the next year, which I think seemed like a more offensive film to my parents than S.O.B. Welcome to early-80s Middle America, kids, where gender identity scares the shit outta people but dick-punching is just good clean fun.

I don’t know why we don’t talk more about John Lawlor. He’s in everything and he’s terrific. Did you know he was the locksmith that Skyler convinced to let her into Walt’s apartment in “Breaking Bad”? Yeah, well, now you do.

How did critics feel about S.O.B.? Not so hot. I’ve always suspected it’s because critics are almost entirely ignored; if mentioned, they’re laughed off as inconsequential. Which is true, honestly, but critics disagreed, and there was often a strain of pettiness in reviews. New York Magazine noted in a disappointed tone that Andrews only bares her breasts, and that Edwards “overvalues the shock value of his wife’s flesh.” Bitch, bitch, bitch.

Admittedly, the film fails to really hit home the fact that the news was falsely reporting that Sally Miles had decided to film an “X-rated” sex scene. Instead, these background news reports sound legitimate, rather than the hype they really are. Felix never intended an x-rated scene, and Sally herself says repeatedly when she’s high on some Dr. Feelgood injection that she’s going to show her “boobies,” so it’s not as though either Night Wind or S.O.B. promised hot sizzling horizontal action and didn’t deliver. It promised breasts. It gave breasts. The industry as portrayed in the movie promised porn. The industry gave breasts. That’s the point, though one that’s lost on many.

Felix, when he’s not jumping around and screaming spittle everywhere, cheerfully explains that if Night Wind succeeds, then he won’t be crazy anymore. He doesn’t mean that it will cure his legitimate mental illness, but that Hollywood will see the profits and retroactively consider all his behavior to be completely sane, probably even his attempts at suicide. His ending is sad but noble, to a degree. Everyone else descends into repulsive absurdity. S.O.B. is a nasty and bitter little take on a nasty and bitter little industry.

]]>http://shebloggedbynight.com/2017/s-o-b-1981/feed/110337The Delinquents (1957)http://shebloggedbynight.com/2017/the-delinquents-1957/
Thu, 13 Apr 2017 13:35:49 +0000http://shebloggedbynight.com/?p=10328What sets The Delinquents apart from other low-budget teen flicks of the time is its professional look. It's clean, even sleek, and without the (usually hilarious) errors one would find in something meant to basically be background noise while teenagers necked in the back seat. Continue reading

]]>Scotty (Tom “Billy Jack” Laughlin) is having a bad day. First his mother (Lotus Corelli) is worrying too much about some local hoodlums messing with him, and tries to prevent him from going out on a date with his girlfriend Janice (Rosemary Howard). When he finally gets to Janice’s house, he’s met by her parents, including her irate father, who thinks she’s too young for Scotty’s intentions and forbids them from seeing each other anymore. Dejected, Scotty goes to a local drive-in, where those local hoodlums, lead by the 18-going-on-40 Cholly (Peter Miller), slash the tires on a rival gang’s car but make it look like Scotty did it. Jumped by a bunch of angry guys, Scotty holds his own, taking out his bad day on the face of one poor chump. Cholly senses Scotty would be good for some shenanigans, though his sidekick Eddy (Richard Bakalyan) doesn’t like the do-gooder Scotty, and makes this well known. Soon Cholly has concocted a nasty scheme that he says will bring Scotty and Janice back together, but which is really meant to harass Scotty, just for fun.

Written and directed by Robert Altman, who up until then had only directed corporate and educational films in his home town of Kansas City, The Delinquents was the brainchild of a local businessman looking to create drive-in movie fodder for his own theaters. What sets The Delinquents apart from other low-budget teen flicks of the time is its professional look. It’s clean, even sleek, and without the (usually hilarious) errors one would find in something meant to basically be background noise while teenagers necked in the back seat.

Though The Delinquents was the kind of exploitation flick marketed to kids at drive-ins, the film opens with the standard narrative voiceover that claims the intended audience is really adults, specifically parents, who need to be educated on the confusing new world their children are living in. And instead of that being just lip service, the film’s opening scenes are at a jazz club, the kind of place where adults go to relax and wind down, a place that the delinquents in question invade. They hassle the adults and wreck the place, and it makes the adults watching — well, if any ever did watch — immediately invested. “Great googly moogly, Martha, what if kids interrupt my evening of cocktails at a third-rate jazz club? Clearly, this is of great sociocultural concern.”

The film goes even further by refusing to paint the parents as one-dimensional monsters like so many other teen movies did at the time. Instead, they’re all trying to do the right thing, but they’re misguided and maybe old-fashioned. Janice’s dad for instance is concerned because his 16-year-old daughter is already talking about having kids with her boyfriend, and he thinks she needs to see other people while she’s young. He also doesn’t think Scotty is as interested in her as he should be, and Scotty proves him right by believing Janice is 17, even after he’s been corrected.

Scotty’s parents are somewhat better, though still flawed. His mother, played by Altman’s then-wife Lotus Corelli, is concerned that the bad kids in the neighborhood would influence her son, but her husband doesn’t care about anything except that she’s talking so loud he can’t hear the TV. Lotus didn’t do much acting but she does well in her role. She was pregnant during filming of The Delinquents, and had to endure the fun of her husband sleeping with another actress, Helen Hawley, who played Janice’s mother. Lotus’s and Robert’s son was born in 1955, and Altman clearly had no idea how to raise him, even though this wasn’t his first child; his daughter Christine, about 8 years old at the time, plays Scotty’s sister.

Lotus relates a story in Robert Altman: The Oral Biography about a time when she came home from work to find their toddler with his head stuck between the bars of the crib, and Altman laying on the couch, doing nothing, apparently clueless as to why this would even be a problem. Scotty’s parents in The Delinquents are basically a version of Lotus and Robert, intentionally or not: the dad is a chubby, lazy man who doesn’t want to parent, and the mother, well-meaning but overly concerned, is played by Lotus.

Rosemary Howard as Janice gives a performance that most people find irritating, though I thought she was quite good for an amateur in a film directed by, well, another amateur. She looks at the camera too much, and there are a couple of what look to be pick-up shots (would a film with such a low budget even have pick-up shots?) where she’s completely zoned out and useless, but otherwise, she’s solid as a girl not even close to being mature enough to handle the situation Scotty has put her in. Howard must have been one of the locals that Altman hired for the film, but there is just nothing about her online anywhere; she did The Delinquents and that was it, save some modeling, which I assume was local to her home state of Missouri and not national. (My own mother modeled in Missouri during the same time frame, which is one of the reasons I wish I could find out more about Howard.)

Other actors came from the Calvin Company, a Kansas City production studio that Altman worked at off and on for years. The three leads, however, came from California after Altman made a scouting trip looking for actors, and he managed to score some pretty experienced guys, considering the low budget. Laughlin and Miller had been in Tea and Sympathy as well as several television shows, though Miller also appeared in The Blackboard Jungle, Forbidden Planet and Rebel Without a Cause. Bakalyan had fewer roles before being cast in Delinquents, but he made quite a career for himself playing a rough kid; his next film would be Jerry Lewis’s The Delicate Delinquent. And it’s surprising how many people confuse promotional photos for The Delicate Delinquent with this film — even this Kansas City magazine article about KCMO locations used in movies uses a picture with Jerry Lewis in it, instead of a picture from The Delinquents!

Speaking of filming locations, Kansas City locals will recognize several sites used in the film. It opens in a local jazz club, the name of which I haven’t been able to find, but which featured well-known Missouri jazz singer Julia Lee. The now-demolished Crest Drive-In movie theater plays a big role, as does the police station on Locust Street (still there in all its boxy 1930s art deco glory), the rose garden in Loose Park, and Allen’s Drive-In, though don’t ask me which location it was.

Unlike other exploitation flicks which prefer to barrel through the plot at lightning speed, The Delinquents allows for some development of character. Cholly spends a good chunk of time coming up with new ideas on how to screw with people. There’s awkward conversation as the scheme forms, lingering shots as he sizes Scotty up, and his sidekick Eddy doing the same but to a lesser and less refined degree. It’s all about testing boundaries, learning to navigate in a world where there aren’t many goals or options, struggling against conformity and boredom, untrusting of actual happiness to the point of destroying it for fun, while remaining enthralled with artificial happiness, i.e. lots of drinking and sex and freedom. But, as Brak always said, fetishizing the meaninglessness of life is little more than rebelling against your own free will: “There are no absolutes, thus you perceive our world as meaningless, when it’s really your own freedom you detest.”

]]>10328Flamingo Road (1949)http://shebloggedbynight.com/2017/flamingo-road-1949/
Thu, 13 Apr 2017 04:59:53 +0000http://shebloggedbynight.com/?p=10317Joan Crawford is Lane Bellamy, a hoochie dancer with a heart of gold, who runs the gamut from fallen woman to girl trying to make good to rich society dame, with all the requisite melodrama that entails. Continue reading

It’s a one-two punch of Joan Crawford tonight here on SBBN, and up next is another Warner Archive MOD DVD release of a formerly out-of-print movie: Flamingo Road (1949).

Lane Bellamy (Joan Crawford) is a hoochie dancer at a sketchy traveling carnival who decides that she’s finally had enough of one-night stands and being chased by the carnival owner’s creditors. She sets up a tent on the outskirts of Boldon City, and fledgling deputy Fielding Carlisle (Zachary Scott) stumbles across her while trying to serve a summons. Instead, he takes her out for dinner, helps her get a decent job, and falls for her. Hard. But Carlisle’s boss, Sheriff Titus Semple (Sydney Greenstreet), has plans to use Carlisle as a political pawn, and he doesn’t want his golden boy involved with a common tramp. He convinces Carlisle to marry the rich girl he’s half-heartedly been courting (Virginia Huston) and frames Lane on a prostitution charge to get her out of town. When she gets out of the clink, she resolves to make her way to Flamingo Road, the swanky area of Boldon City where the rich folks live.

And somehow she actually gets there, despite immediately going to work for Lute Mae (Gladys George), a local madam. Her brothel hosts plenty of parties for state politicians, and handsome Dan Reynolds (David Brian) is a frequent customer. He’s taken with Lane and eventually marries her, and decides to clean up his act, at least a little. Unfortunately, the loathsome Sheriff Semple has other ideas.

Flamingo Road was one of Joan’s last films with Warner Bros., made just a couple of years before she became a free agent. I’ve always loved Joan’s work at Warners, even though my heart truly belongs to Bette Davis, and the rivalry between the two has turned into such a huge cultural thing that I often feel guilty for enjoying a Joan Crawford Warner Bros. flick. To make matters worse, Flamingo Roadwas originally intended as a vehicle for Ann Sheridan, and I think she would have been amazing in it. (Check out that studio copy in the linked article. Oh, brother! They sure laid it on thick!) In fact, the property was bought specifically for her, and studio notices sent out about the film in its early stages very clearly mention the fact that the corrupt politics all centered around the KKK. By the time the film was made with Crawford — per Mark Vieira, she demanded it be taken away from Sheridan and given to her instead, and Warners acquiesced — all mentions of the Klan were removed.

Despite being very much toned down, there’s still some pretty saucy stuff here. There’s a definite post-war attitude in the film; Dan, for instance, makes a point of asking Lane her name after he’s slept with her, and a bad guy gets shot and no one has to go to prison for it to satisfy the Breen Office. Politically, though, the film is a completely neutered version of the novel. It gets the full Hollywood treatment in that no one really gives a hang about corruption: one or two dirty politicians bite it and suddenly everything is just fine. Variety’s own Herm, however, insisted that the political corruption in the film was heavily exaggerated for cinematic effect. I suppose he may have been referring to a hilarious moment when we learn a “mother’s committee” has organized a violent pitchforks ‘n’ torches protest against a woman with a naughty past, where they throw rocks through her windows in an attempt to literally stone her. Because nothing says “we want a clean and respectable town” like trying to bash someone’s head in with a rock.

“You just wouldn’t believe how much trouble it is to get rid of a dead elephant.”

Flamingo Road is pretty standard Warner Bros. fare for the 1940s, a little edgier than usual but with the slick production values and solid character actors everyone had come to expect. That said, there are some errors of continuity that you don’t generally see in Warner films of the time. An alternate take of Lane in her tent when Carlisle first shows up is briefly used, notable because her mouth isn’t moving even though she’s supposed to be singing, and her hair is a different color and style. Several scenes of Greenstreet’s have his clothes going from rumpled to tidy back to rumpled again, and the less said about his accent, the better.

Lane is first seen working at a carnival that features an armless man who does everything with his feet. A missed opportunity for a reference to The Unknown! Not that Joan would have appreciated a reminder in 1949 that her career began in the silents.

Greenstreet is good, though, even if he’s been given a character without much to do other than be evil. Zach Scott is great as usual, and Gladys George as Lute Mae (pronounced Looty May) is just a whole lot of fun. Fred Clark, still early in his career, has a small role that he plays so well you wish it were a larger part.

Lane runs the gamut from fallen carnival dancer to girl trying to make good to rich society dame, with all the requisite melodrama that entails. Politically, some of the men around her do bad things for power, some go bad because they’re weak, some bad men want to stop being bad. It’s all kind of vague and not very interesting, as Semple’s evil nature is only of concern when it hurts Lane. Lane, and by extension, Joan Crawford, is the center of this particular universe, and if anything happens in the film, it has to be about her.

Lane ends up in the hoosegow, as one does, and in the same prison garb she wore in Paid (1930).

The Warner Archive MOD DVD comes with the same special features as the original release: “Curtain Razor” cartoon, an episode of “Playhouse Radio” featuring Joan in 1950, and the standard featurette that was produced for most of the Warner releases back in the mid 2000s.

]]>10317Torch Song (1953)http://shebloggedbynight.com/2017/torch-song-1953/
Thu, 13 Apr 2017 00:46:57 +0000http://shebloggedbynight.com/?p=10297If you had to pick one best thing about the camp classic Torch Song (1953) -- as if it's even possible to do so, but let's pretend -- it's that Joan Crawford's Broadway diva Jenny Stewart is a stone cold monster. Continue reading

Hard-as-nails Broadway diva Jenny Stewart (Joan Crawford) is busy working on a hot new property that she’s sure will fail if she doesn’t take complete control. Stewart, inexplicably beloved by teens, makes life miserable for everyone working on the play, including her pianist who quits, citing an inability to afford the psychotherapy needed to put up with her. Stage manager Joe (Harry Morgan) hires accompanist Tye Graham (Michael Wilding), a talented pianist blinded in the war. After a rocky start, Jenny realizes Tye is in love with her, though she’s ambivalent about him, and who wouldn’t be when you’ve got a boytoy (Gig Young) and dozens of men at your beck and call. Tye also has the lovely Martha (Dorothy Patrick) as a sort-of girlfriend, who is devoted to him, though he only loves Jenny.

Torch Songwas ostensibly Crawford’s big comeback to MGM, and was surprisingly considered an overall comeback of sorts, though she’d been nominated for an Oscar just a year prior in RKO’s well-received Sudden Fear. She really didn’t need a comeback, but she thought she did, and MGM wanted to capitalize on the return of their former studio queen, thus everyone went all-out for this Technicolor extravaganza that now, over six decades after its release, still has the power to stun with its campy excess.

Jenny Stewart returning from a party with one earring stuck in her hair. No one ever explains this.

If you’ve seen the terrific spoof Die, Mommie, Die! (2003), you’ve seen Charles Busch channel Stanwyck, Davis and Crawford all in a single sentence. What’s surprising and maybe even a little upsetting about Joan in Torch Song is that she’s doing the exact same thing, to a much lesser degree, but not unconsciously. Close your eyes when she’s chewing out the poor stage crew or when she’s lecturing her boytoy Cliff about how she has to do every last thing, from arrangements to designing clothes to props, or else the show won’t work. You’ll hear Barbara Stanwyck from Clash by Night (1952) or Bette Davis from All About Eve (1950) clear as a bell; there’s no mistaking what’s going on. She’s imitating them for lord knows what reason.

Sure, it’s part of the camp value of Torch Song, but it also speaks to Joan’s increasing insecurity about her place in Hollywood as an aging actress. The same goes for her appearance, which is exaggerated and borderline grotesque in close-ups. This was the first time the Joan Crawford of the inch-thick eyebrows and overdone lips made an appearance, and audiences were confused. Her hyperfeminine appearance was surely an attempt to look younger, to keep her standing as the so-called eternal woman as she was famously dubbed in 1933: “Joan may be ambitious, but she is the eternal woman at heart. She couldn’t be so exciting if she led an ordinary life.”

Joan, the eternal female, designing costumes in her fabulously appointed apartment as her arm candy bends over and kisses her on the head.

In fact, Joan is even billed as “the eternal female” in advertising at the time, something that, along with the poster art using old photos of her and invoking her 1934 classic I Live My Life poster, plus the rather excitable ad copy reminding us that this was Crawford’s comeback to MGM, seemed a desperate ploy to fool audiences into thinking that this was the mid-1930s all over again.

The thing is, Joan didn’t need to exaggerate her appearance to such a degree. Everything was dialed up to 11, from the eyebrows to the lips to the cinched waist to — with apologies to my more delicate readers — a bra with seams specifically designed to hoist those girls up and point them straight at the sky. Just a year prior, Crawford was looking lovely and natural and dignified. Here she is in 1952 — it’s one of my favorite photos of Joan:

She looks fantastic. She, or someone at the studio, apparently didn’t agree — and to be honest, one “A.W.” of The New York Timesdeclared she never looked lovelier than in Torch Song — so Joan ended up in what was basically female drag, thus we now have horrible yet hilarious fanart like the Joan CrawfordShame Collection by Matt Figures.

The infamous blackface number. As you can tell, everyone is in blackface, not just Jenny Stewart. Also, all the men’s belts are ties. Charming.

If you had to pick one best thing about this camp classic — as if it’s even possible to do so, but let’s pretend — it’s that Joan’s Jenny Stewart is a stone cold monster. She’s mean to everyone, all the time, without exception, but without the kind of talent that would usually excuse such behavior. Crawford was a decent dancer when younger, but in chorus lines and popular dance contests. She can pose beautifully and has a fantastic figure, but she was never truly trained in dance, and it shows. Her singing, as anyone who saw The Hollywood Revue of 1929 can attest, was not good, and Crawford is just passable here.

Scenes like the above add to the legend of Joan’s ego. Her assistant Anne (character great Maidie Norman) comes in and moves the chair specifically to that mark, so she’s all but hidden from view even though she’s in the frame. Who thinks this is a good idea? It’s so awkwardly framed you have to wonder how this even happened.

Stewart is complainey and awful and insists that, if the show doesn’t do absolutely everything she says at all times, she will just not show up, forcing the show to close and putting everyone out of work. Her accompanist drinks heavily to put up with her and then just disappears, unable to face her for one more minute. At one point, she pitches such a fit she scares Tye’s seeing eye dog.

Let me repeat that: she scares his seeing eye dog. Who writes a character like this for a standard movie musical? This is horrifying. This is Joel and Ethan Coen stuff right here.

Every time I see this 12-foot-tall glitter-covered cut-out of Joan I wonder where it is now. Who got it? What did they do with it? And how did they get it home?

Jenny Stewart is so insecure that she throws a party for herself and invites only men.

Things chug along about as you expect in a musical romance, though with more hostility than usual, until a finale where Jenny chases Martha out of Tye’s home; Martha leaves so quickly you suspect she was punched, or at least threatened. Then Tye and Jenny declare their affection for each other, along with making an implication about the seeing eye dog that I’m frankly just not comfortable with.

Joan’s outfits are undeniably fantastic in this film. You can also see how blurry the print is at times. This is a film that may be due for a full restoration.

Warner Archive has re-released Torch Song on a MOD DVD which is the same print as the now out-of-print version. Included are several special features, including the mid-2000s featurette “Tough Baby: Torch Song” (from the series of DVD extras that Warners made roughly a decade ago, featuring Jeanine Basinger, Molly Haskell and others), plus the “TV of Tomorrow” cartoon, a Jimmy Fund PSA, several minutes of a Joan Crawford recording session (audio only), and the trailer.

—Thanks to the SBBN readers for their patience in the last couple of weeks. We’ve had some database errors that seem to be fixed now, but comments will be off for the duration until a new commenting system can be found.

]]>10297Demon Seed (1977)http://shebloggedbynight.com/2017/demon-seed-1977/
http://shebloggedbynight.com/2017/demon-seed-1977/#commentsMon, 03 Apr 2017 15:31:59 +0000http://shebloggedbynight.com/?p=10280Demon Seed, previously available only on DVD, is now also available in Blu-ray from Warner Archive. It's a heady mix of frightening and campy, the kind of film that would do equally well in a double feature with Alien or with Terrorvision (go go Gerrit Graham film marathon!) Continue reading

Dr. Alex Harris (Fritz Weaver), an expert in robotics and artificial intelligence, is leaving his wife Susan (Julie Christie), a psychologist who is probably also a doctor, but the film goes to great pains to make this unclear. Alex has been spending all his days and nights at the lab, working on a major artificial intelligence unit that promises to change the world. His physical and emotional distance has proved insurmountable, so the couple is splitting up in one of those frustratingly amicable ways that only happen in the movies, not that real humans like you and me can’t be amicable even in times of great stress, but that real humans tend to have emotions; neither Alex nor Susan possess much emotional depth, at least not until the home security system gets hijacked by Alex’s astonishing invention: Proteus IV.

The irony is that Proteus, in part because of the excellent voiceover work of someone who either was Robert Vaughn or just sounded like Robert Vaughn, is one danged emotional piece of machinery. Proteus is fed information — languages, the classics, scientific information, everything you can think of — manually, and then processes it so that he can reveal his own solution to whatever problem has arisen. The trick is that the humans want Proteus to be like any other computer and simply solve what they consider mathematical or geographical problems, while Proteus has developed a conscience, and refuses to do things like create equipment that would harm the environment.

All these green tubes are one computer.

Proteus is also hypocritical and pissy and malevolent, which is why he commandeers Alex’s abandoned computer lab in the basement of his home. Alex no longer lives there but Susan does, and soon all the futuristic gizmos in the house go haywire, trapping her there at Proteus’ whim, with no one apparently missing the woman who usually has a full work schedule and has her own private secretary. Proteus chases the few people who arrive away, at any rate, so it probably doesn’t matter if a few or a whole bunch of people miss her. Proteus also controls a makeshift robot of Alex’s and uses it to create an enormous sort of thing that looks like a Rubik’s Twist. A murderous Rubik’s Twist, as poor nerdy-hot Walter (Garrit Graham) learns the hard way when he finally realizes Susan is in trouble.

The main issue here is, as the title suggests, Proteus’s desire to implant his own seed — yes, he created computer-y sperm full of his own DNA, ew — into Susan, forcing her to have his presumably highly intelligent computer-human hybrid child. She’s reluctant but can’t manage to escape, and finally succumbs to Proteus’s threats. Astonishing scenes of computer-robot rape ensue.

This scene is upsetting.

Demon Seed is a sort of psychosexual warning of things to come if humans don’t… learn to fear computers, I guess. It’s atmospheric and genuinely creepy, but it’s also very strange. There’s such an odd mix here of things that were impressive, especially for the time, and things that were just incredibly ill-advised. Often, Demon Seed zips right past campy and into gleeful offensiveness, made worse by the fact that you can tell someone, somewhere, probably in the early stages of filmmaking, was absolutely convinced they were going to create a minor masterpiece in the psychological thriller genre.

Instead, what they created was so unintentionally funny that it was probably the biggest influence on the satirical anti-classic Simon (1980), a movie that could very well have been written specifically to take the piss out of Demon Seed’s strangely earnest worries about computers stealin’ our women and rapin’ them ’til they liked it. (“Wanna see a woman raped by a house?” the late, great Ken Hanke asked in his review, a perfect example of how inexplicable it was that Ken never became a household name.)

This scene is also upsetting.

Meanwhile, WaPo’s Gary Arnold — you know him as the guy who is frequently and falsely named as someone fired for hating Star Wars and/or Tender Mercies, depending on which urban legend you’re hearing at the time — wrote that Julie Christie was unconvincing because “One tends to associate Christie with girls who’ll try anything once,” an observation that serves as a fine reminder that, during the golden era of film criticism, we were learning a lot more about humanity from the critics than we were from films, not all of it comforting.

Christie is not convincing, but it’s not because she seems like the kind of lady who would love to get raped by a bunch of machinery controlled by rogue AI. It’s because she’s inherently a strong woman, someone who has always come across as being able to hold her own both physically and psychologically. While Susan does have a few good ideas for escaping the house, her attempts are truncated and poorly choreographed, as though no one involved felt it was worth the bother to make her truly seem trapped. With some of her attempts at escape, there is no reason she can’t learn from her first try and improve upon it and give it another go. And sometimes it’s just hard to understand why, for instance, the floor is too hot to touch, but the wooden table sitting atop it is cool and unscorched.

Susan just happens to like to be nude all the time in what is totally not a creepy exploitation thing.

There’s a little Exorcist in Demon Seed, a little 2001: A Space Odyssey, but it’s mostly Rosemary’s Baby with computers and a heady lack of shame. It’s also missing the intent; in Rosemary, the husband is conscious of what he’s doing, while in Demon Seed, the husband is as clueless as can be, even embarrassingly so. The fact that an artificial intelligence unit has kidnapped and raped the wife of its creator without the creator suspecting a thing is a nod to how dehumanized he’s become, how checked out of society he is, thanks to his obsession with technology, but that’s not a particularly interesting psychological angle in and of itself.

More interesting would have been a deeper examination of Susan’s eventual acquiescence to Proteus’s demands, as well as some indication that the filmmakers realized that Proteus really did have a sense of humor, just like Alex noted early in the film. If you remember that, the film, especially the absolutely cracked finale, makes a hell of a lot more sense.

The Bricklin SV-1: the “futuristic” car movies get when they can’t afford a DeLorean.

Demon Seed, previously available only on DVD, is now also available in Blu-ray from Warner Archive. It’s a heady mix of frightening and campy, the kind of film that would do equally well in a double feature with Alien or with Terrorvision (go go Gerrit Graham film marathon!) This is a film that was only available in an edited version until Warner Archive released it on DVD, and the Blu-ray looks even better than the already lovely DVD does. Blu-ray.com notes that the print looks rougher than Finian’s Rainbow (reviewed here) and SOB (soon to be reviewed here) but I have to respectfully disagree: to me, the print preserves the exact kind of subdued, lightly grained look we’ve come to expect from mid-70s American fare. The special effects are solid, especially the robots, though the tech is outdated (Thrill! at the 8-inch IBM disk drives!) and the sound is terrific. It’s an impressive release and a fun if upsetting film.

Finian’s Rainbow (1968), a politically themed musical based on a 20-year-old Broadway hit was, somehow, Francis Ford Coppola’s first major motion picture. Starring Fred Astaire as Finian McLonergan and Petula Clark as his daughter Sharon, Finian’s Rainbow features songs that, by 1968, were favorite standards. The film follows the pair as they trek across the United States in search of Rainbow Valley in the fictitious state of Missitucky. Finian has a grand plan: to plant a pot of gold in a valley near Fort Knox, believing that doing so will result in more gold sprouting from the ground. The only problem is that Finian has stolen the gold from Og (Tommy Steele), a leprechaun who has followed him to Rainbow Valley, desperate for the gold back. The gold keeps Og a leprechaun; without it, he starts to slowly turn human. Worse yet, gold turns to dross after three wishes, and if they aren’t careful, people nearby will accidentally use up the gold and doom Og to a life of humanity.

Meanwhile, in the idyllic Rainbow Valley, race relations are becoming strained. Racist senator Billboard Rawkins (Keenan Wynn) is hassling the people, while whitebread but well-meaning activist Woody Mahoney (Don Francks in an unconvincing wig, which SBBN will always contend is the best kind of wig) tries to protect them. Sharon falls for Woody; she also become enraged at Senator Rawkins’ racism, and without realizing a pot o’ gold is nearby, wishes him black so he can learn a valuable lesson. Shenanigans, as they say, ensue.

Finian’s Rainbow is stagey, self-consciously so, which helps remind the audience that what we’re watching is allegory and spoof, lest anyone get the radical idea that gender, economic and racial equality were something meant for the real world. It’s a bit surprising that this play originated in 1947, since its decidedly left-leaning politics fit so nicely into the zeitgeist of 1968 Middle America; actual leftists had long since moved on, as Coppola later said: “A lot of liberal people were going to feel it was old pap.”[*]

A few changes from the 1947 script were necessary by 1968, though, namely that, as the producer of the aborted 1953 animated version of Finian’s Rainbow said, the film “tells you that a terrible person turns black because he’s so bad, and then redeems himself and they reward him by making him white again.”

Not everything that should have been updated was, however. The senator still turns black, which in this case means putting Keenan Wynn in truly terrible blackface which rubs off when touched, and stays rubbed off for minutes on end because Coppola wanted long takes. Then there’s Howard, the black botanist-turned-butler who is working on a revolutionary new invention: crossing mint plants with tobacco plants to create pre-mentholated tobacco.

During the HUAC era, Finian’s Rainbow was very clearly touting a socialist message, yet the play was an enormous success. Maybe it was in spite of the HUAC era, maybe it was because of the HUAC era, but the original Broadway production won three Tony awards and ran for 725 performances.

Though maybe it wasn’t as easily successful as its run on Broadway makes it seem. When the 1953 animated version, to be directed by HUAC victim John Hubley, was in production, funding was difficult to get. There’s a fantastic essay here at Michael Sporn’s site about the animated film that never came to be, which also includes recently unearthed storyboards. At some point Frank Sinatra learned of the project and was “wildly excited” about it, and eager to sign on as a voice actor and singer. Then Ella Fitzgerald signed on, Nelson Riddle agreed to orchestrate, and everyone else followed, happy to work with some of the biggest names in the music business. (Sinatra’s recordings from the production are available on a 2002 box set. In 1963 he, Fitzgerald, and several Rat Pack pals took on the entire soundtrack for Frank’s Reprise Records.)

Tommy Steele as Og, the beleaguered leprechaun, is… shrill and melodramatic, to put it kindly.

The International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees was very pro-HUAC at the time, and when they learned of Hubley’s involvement in the project, they hit the roof. Hubley had been ducking HUAC for a long time after quitting Disney in 1941during the famous animators’ strike and IATSE, the union that basically controlled all the animation studios in Hollywood, wanted Hubley to testify to “clear his name,” which of course really meant “to name names.” He refused, too many people distanced themselves from him, and the project fell apart.

If I talk a lot about this film that was never made, it’s because the live-action 1968 version will always live in the shadow of the phantom 1953 animated version that was thwarted by political extremism. But with such a political work of art, albeit American politics coated in a thick glossy layer of fantasy and confused quasi-Irish myth, you’re going to get some backlash, even in 1968. Coppola acknowledged liberals would think it was “old pap,” but he also knew conservatives would think it was “nonsense,” and he’d end up getting it from both sides.[*] Thus he re-wrote the script, updating it for 1968 audiences and at times toning down the “liberal nonsense” to family-friendly degrees.

The results were mixed. Choreographer Hermes Pan was frustrated with having to work with the soft, mushy forest set left over from Camelot (1967), but Coppola blamed Pan for the problems, fired him, then choreographed the rest of the film himself, where “choreograph” means “Coppola told dancers to ‘move with the music’ and little else.”[*] As delightful as Finian’s Rainbow is, and as professional and accomplished as Astaire is, you can tell the difference between the Pan scenes and the Coppola scenes.

Renata Adler, who was always obsessed with the physical appearances of movie stars, had some rather nitpicky complaints, but her observation that Fred’s feet go missing during several dancing scenes is sadly accurate, the result of poor studio cropping for a roadshow version of the film. It was such a shocking mistake that it practically galvanized a nation at the time. But she also groused about Astaire looking old, as though that were a technical issue on par with bad dubbing and a clumsy crop. In turn, Roger Ebert complained about Adler’s complaining. Behold the heady world of film criticism, my friends.

Pulp Fiction (1994) Dir: Quentin Tarantino

Finian’s Rainbow wasn’t a box office smash, but it did bring in about $2M in profit [*] and help establish Francis Ford Coppola as a legitimate director; Coppola would also meet George Lucas, a Warner Bros. intern, during the making of the film. It would be Fred Astaire’s final musical, and thoroughly fail to launch the film careers of either Petula Clark or Tommy Steele. But it’s a fun film, it really is family friendly, the songs are unabashed standards, and it’s part of Hollywood history.

]]>Jules Dassin’s Phaedra (1962) opens with gigantic ships, fireworks, big corporate grins and nasty sideways looks. It’s the ceremonial launching of yet another enormous ship commissioned by Greek shipping magnate Thanos (Raf Vallone), who has dedicated this particular trade-transport leviathan to his beautiful wife Phaedra (Melina Mercouri). After a chat with friends, Thanos discovers that his college-aged son Alexis (Anthony Perkins) may be attending the London School of Business, but his paintings have been featured in art gallery openings, and he’s worried Alexis may turn to art instead of business. Phaedra is dispatched to London to bring her step-son Alexis back home, a chore that doesn’t exactly excite her, as she has met Alexis only once before, in a meeting where the then-teen boy made it clear he loathed her.

Times have changed, it seems, and they fall for each other the moment they meet in a London museum, and embark on a passionate affair. When Alexis realizes Phaedra is never going to leave Thanos, he breaks off with her, leading to a whirlwind of jealousy and anger that ends with, well, a tragedy.

Dassin takes both his muse and location almost too literally in Phaedra (1962) by indulging in this reworking of the Greek tragedy Hippolytus. Co-written with Margarita Lymberaki, the film concentrates almost entirely on the almost-incest angle while neglecting most of the rest of Euripides’ tale. The incestuous relationship lacks teeth, however, as Alexis and Phaedra have barely met prior to her visit to London; she almost doesn’t recognize him when she arrives, and one never gets the sense of them being related in any way.

James A. Boon in Ethnographica Moralia suggests that the film is meant to memorialize the sex between Phaedra and her step-son, which is only referred to in Hippolytus, rather than the entirety of the myth.

It’s hard to blame Dassin for lavishing screen time on Melina Mercouri, a fine, charismatic actress and his long-time love, though now is as good a time as any to mention that Dassin was still married to his first wife during filming. The real story in Phaedra, however, isn’t with Phaedra at all, but found in the backgrounds where beautiful Greek antiquities languish in a stark London museum, thousands of miles from their homes. It’s in Alexis’ attentions toward his father Thanos, his attempts to fit into Greek culture, and in Thanos’ corporate greed. Phaedra is the link in all this, the reason, the cause of and solution to many of these larger problems, but she’s too consumed with a tragic fate that she feels is inevitable and which, thanks to a tenuous screenplay, seems to have been invented in her own mind, and for no good reason.

Perkins posing for a publicity shot in a marble seat dating to about 400 AD, at the Theatre of Dionysus in Athens, Greece. The noted historian Pausanias in his Description of Greece (c. 140 AD) described the large temple and sanctuary dedicated to Hippolytus in the town of Troezen, located across the gulf from Athens, as including the temple of Aphrodite Calascopia, which stood on the area where the real-life Phaedra was said to have lusted after Hippolytus as he exercised in the stadium below. Phaedra’s tomb was also reported to be in this area, though the ruins in Troezen now consist mostly of the sanctuary and little else.

There’s a rather odd scene early on when Phaedra says she doesn’t want to walk around London in her high heels, so she and Alexis drop into a shoe store where she buys a stylish pair of flats. She remarks on how odd she looks, Alexis agrees, and multiple men stop in the street to give her a strange look because she’s not in heels. My vast research (read: 15 minutes on vintage fashion sites) shows plenty of dressyflats were available for women in 1962, especially in London. Certainly, this scene is supposed to show her tendency to throw caution to the wind, to do things that will make her an outcast, to rebuff tradition, but scenes of this nature rarely work when they are based on such an illogical conceit.

But hey, it’s largely subjective as to what works and what doesn’t, and a scene at the end when Alexis, our revamped Hippolytus, is fleeing the scene of the Greek tragedy, is the scene that most reviewers mention when discussing the flaws in this film. Alexis is ranting and raving out loud to no one, mostly to himself, but also to J.S. Bach, whose Toccata and Fugue is blasting from the radio. It’s a fantastic breakdown yet one I can’t imagine anyone was expecting in 1962; it has the air of a decidedly post-millennium freak-out. The Digital Fix, in their review for the DVD release several years ago, calls it “uncomfortable,” which is maybe a touch harsh, though one does wonder how a man of British and Greek descent, educated in London, could all of a sudden sound like a Midwestern carnival barker.

For my money, the crazed rantings of a young man as he drives a sports car he coveted in the same way a child covets a shiny new toy really works in the film, and Perkins sells the hell out of that scene. For almost everyone else, that scene is their best example of why the film is a flawed entry in Dassin’s oeuvre, and the strange shoe scene that is going to irritate me probably until my dying day doesn’t even register. That’s opinions for ya.

Still, one can hardly argue that Phaedra is almost a parody of the kind of European art-house films that sitcoms and comedians brought up in the 1960s when they wanted to allude to something edgy without getting on the wrong side of the censors. There’s the saucy sex scene, the megalo-romantic dialogue, the shots filmed on location with a million lookie-loos in the background, the wide scenic shots, the sturdy and toothsome male lead, the American actor brought in for box-office appeal, it’s all here. And in that context, it’s a solid piece of entertainment, yet Americans stayed away in droves, as they do, while Europeans loved Phaedra to bits.

]]>10246A Game of Death (1945)http://shebloggedbynight.com/2017/a-game-of-death-1945/
Thu, 16 Mar 2017 20:29:51 +0000http://shebloggedbynight.com/?p=10237A Game of Death, RKO's remake of their 1932 classic The Most Dangerous Game, was one of Robert Wise's earliest directorial efforts, and was praised by critics on its release. Continue reading

A Game of Death, RKO’s remake of their 1932 classic The Most Dangerous Game, was one of the earliest of director Robert Wise’s B-movie films. Positively received on release, the film has been mostly forgotten over the years, except by low-budget aficionados and John Loder fans, of which there must be tens, maybe even dozens, including myself.

When the yacht carrying celebrity hunter and memoirist Don Rainsford (John Loder), along with a sizeable crew and several of his colleagues, crashes on a reef off a deserted tropical island, Rainsford finds himself the only survivor, sharks having made entrees of the rest of the poor souls aboard. Stumbling through the photogenic leafiness, he encounters a large home inhabited by a scrunched-faced mute (Noble Johnson) and his employer, the rich, eccentric and suave Erich Krieger (Edgar Barrier). Krieger is a fan of Rainsford’s and offers him a place to stay, along with two charming guests, Ellen Trowbridge (Audrey Long) and her brother Robert (Russell Wade). But the siblings are also curiously victims of a boat crashing into the reef, and Krieger is unable to send them home due to vague repairs needed by the boat launch.

Then there’s also the little matter of Krieger’s odd behavior, though maybe it’s not so odd, considering he’s a goateed German with a mysterious scar on his head and a psychotic love of hunting. Ellen tries to tell Rainsford that the previous guests have been disappearing one by one, and screams in the night indicate they are killed while on hunting jaunts with Krieger, but Rainsford is kind of a Stump Beefchunk in this version and it doesn’t seem to sink in as quickly as it should. Once it does, well, things get real pretty damn quick.

The biggest problem with using footage from the original is that the original is positively lush with vegetation, while the remake is often shot on the California coastline with a couple of palm fronds jammed into the ground to make it look like a tropical isle. The interiors are gorgeous; my good pal Richard Harland Smith (I lie; I’ve never met him, but I like him lots) has the dope on where a lot of those sets came from in his commentary track.

Though it’s a pretty strict remake of the original, the difference in the leads alone makes a huge difference in the feel of the film. Joel McCrea, the lead in The Most Dangerous Game, always had a bit of the goofball about him, plus he was almost half Loder’s age and significantly less bulky. That bulk makes a difference! A Game of Death is the earliest example I know of where the lead is played by a big, beefy, stoic, decidedly non-intellectual guy who looks exactly like the dudes on the covers of pulp paperbacks. Rex Reason was probably the actor who most purely exemplified this type of character, though Reb Brown comes in a very close second. Loder turns out to be very good at being the beefy B-movie hero, a pleasant surprise after seeing him in films like The Private Life of Henry VIII, Now Voyager and How Green Was My Valley. He doesn’t have a whole lot of complicated emotions to get in the way.

Above: Johnson, Loder, Gene Stutenroth and Barrier in one of the many pulp paperback poses throughout the film. Noble Johnson appears in two roles in A Game of Death, as Carib as well as in the reused footage from The Most Dangerous Game as the Count’s sidekick Ivan, where he’s sporting one of those hilariously unconvincing beards that were so popular in the silent and pre-Code era.

This isn’t the only time something like this has happened in a remake. Curtis Nero appears in both West of Zanzibar (1928) and its remake Kongo (1932) because Kongo reused the earlier film’s footage. An even wackier example would be Riding High, the 1950 remake of Broadway Bill (1934), both directed by Frank Capra. Reused footage from the earlier film included actors Ward Bond, Clarence Muse, Charles Lane, William Demarest and several others, most of whom were called back in to re-shoot some scenes for the 1950 version, playing the same characters. To say they didn’t look like they had 16 years earlier is a terrible understatement, though it appears Charles Lane could still fit into his old suit.

Robert Wise was just off his Gothic horror The Body Snatcher when he directed A Game of Death, and though a pretty standard remake of the original, one can see the usual Wise touches in the film. Still, Wise excelled at directing more evocative screenplays, and his direction becomes decidedly workmanlike here, as well as in Criminal Court, reviewed here on SBBN previously. Wise recalled that he would sometimes spend months sitting around waiting for work: “That’s why I did films like A Game of Death and Criminal Court. Also, I was still learning. You don’t learn when you’re sitting at home.”

That’s not to say he liked doing the film. As Wes D. Gehring quotes in his book Robert Wise: Shadowlands, Wise once told Billy Wilder, “I’m against remakes in general, because if a picture is good, you shouldn’t remake it, and if it’s lousy, why remake it?”

Still, the film got some solid reviews, my favorite of which was THR who declared that the suspense was so well done “that it would require a moron or a nerveless individual to sit back and relax.” Shadowlands also quotes Variety, who called the film a “chillerdiller,” which is a fantastic word that I shall work into my everyday conversation.

A Game of Death will be released on Blu-ray and DVD by Kino Lorber on March 21, 2017, in a newly remastered print. The Blu comes with English subtitles (good ones!), audio commentary by Richard Harland Smith, and trailers for several films.

]]>10237The Yakuza (1974)http://shebloggedbynight.com/2017/the-yakuza-1974/
http://shebloggedbynight.com/2017/the-yakuza-1974/#commentsTue, 14 Mar 2017 19:04:09 +0000http://shebloggedbynight.com/?p=10230The Yakuza is a strange little mash-up of neo-noir and yakuza-eiga. It didn't do well at the box office, but has become a cult classic in the years since. Continue reading

World-weary retired detective Harry Kilmer (Robert Mitchum) is asked by his former Army buddy turned businessman pal George Tanner (Brian Keith) to help with a sticky situation he’s gotten himself into. After making a sketchy deal with a yakuza clan, George lost the weapons he promised to send them after accepting a sizeable chunk of change and has no way to get replacements. He tells Harry he’s offered to work with them on the situation but they won’t listen, and in retaliation, have kidnapped Harry’s college student daughter, who had been staying in Tokyo. George pressures Harry into contacting Tanaka Ken (Takakura Ken), the brother of Harry’s former girlfriend Eiko (Kishi Keiko). Harry once saved Ken’s life, but the two men dislike either other intensely. Ken is former yakuza himself and knows he will be in danger if he gets into yakuza business again, but his obligation to Harry overrides yakuza tradition. They rescue the girl quickly enough, but the real danger is in protecting Ken, Eiko and Eiko’s daughter (Christina Kokubo) from the yakuza.

The Yakuza is a strange little mash-up of neo-noir and yakuza-eiga, one that didn’t do well at the box office at the time, but which has made it a cult classic in the years since. It works in part because yakuza films in the 1960s and 1970s were borrowing heavily from American gangster films, so it made sense for gangster films to start borrowing back. But the American translation, if you will, of yakuza-eiga to neo-noir doesn’t allow for the kind of violence the Japanese films were (and are) known for, which I think may prevent The Yakuza from enjoying a larger modern audience. Critics were pearl-clutchy about the violence in 1974, and maybe still are today, to an extent, whereas I think most of us who have seen Japanese gangster cinema will be surprised at how light the violence is, comparatively speaking.

Robert Mitchum’s trademark complete lack of caring plays very well onscreen in films noir, as I think we all know, but also here plays as respect for another culture, which the character Harry certainly has, but it’s a little uncertain whether Mitchum does. It’s not that his personal views are an issue, but that, in the few moments in the script where Harry asks questions about Japan, the seams start to show in Mitchum’s performance. His line reading is more wooden and he’s not convincing in the least. With Mitchum, though, who knows why that happened. Bad day, didn’t like the script, the interns couldn’t make a decent pot of coffee, who knows. Pollack later said in an interview that Mitchum was like “a powerful and lazy horse” who wanted “to walk as slow as possible” and “get away with doing as little as possible,” something those of us who have seen his infamous interview with the late Robert Osborne know all too well: “He was about as pleasant to interview that day as Attila the Hun,” he later recalled.

Those unconvincing moments are few and far between, thankfully. There are solid performances all around in the film from the leads, and including Richard Jordan as a skeezy-cool henchman and veteran actor Okada Eiji as the angry mob boss. The Yakuza does an admirable job, especially considering the year it was released, in respecting Japanese cultural and, to a lesser extent, cinematic tradition. There’s a white guy (Herb Edelman, of all people, though he’s surprisingly good) there to explain the culture, of course, but much of the traditions are illustrated by Japanese actors or explained by the Japanese characters, thus dispensing with the typical “filtering” of culture through the eyes of a “trusted” white person. There are some missteps, such as continuing to “reveal” bits of Japanese culture long after it’s no longer necessary to the plot or atmosphere, and the (probably inevitable) association of irezumi with sex and sexual deviance, but overall the film will likely impress a modern audience.

Sydney Pollack: “I was concerned with trying to get on film the essence of this character who had been marinated by life, which is the feeling you get when you look at Mitchum’s face. You have the sense of a man who has seen it all and been through it all.”

]]>http://shebloggedbynight.com/2017/the-yakuza-1974/feed/210230The Last Best Year (1990)http://shebloggedbynight.com/2017/the-last-best-year-1990/
Wed, 08 Mar 2017 21:36:29 +0000http://shebloggedbynight.com/?p=10218When Jane, a career woman and quiet loner (Bernadette Peters), discovers she has a terminal illness, she has no one to turn to. Her doctor recommends psychologist and friend Wendy Haller (Mary Tyler Moore) to help her come to terms with her diagnosis, and in doing so, helps her open up to others. Soon she has a small but solid group of friends and relatives there with her as she fights against cancer. The Last Best Year originally aired on ABC in November of 1990, just at the beginning of the golden era of made-for-TV movies, and was well-received by critics on its release. That said, Ken Tucker’s review makes a good point: it’s fantasy to the point of improbability, and for most people faced with terminal illness, they don’t get pat resolutions or unlimited financial and emotional support. Have you ever wondered what happens to the other patients of the doctors in these films? Wendy spends so much time with Jane that I can’t imagine she has time for anyone else. It’s how we would want to deal with terminal illness if we had the choice, and somehow Jane has that choice, though there is never any explanation why. In real life, how do you even explain something like that? You don’t. In cinema, however, there is always some kind of explanation, usually that the person in question is deserving of a reprieve from death or, at the least, a good death. The Last Best Year is somewhat … Continue reading

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When Jane, a career woman and quiet loner (Bernadette Peters), discovers she has a terminal illness, she has no one to turn to. Her doctor recommends psychologist and friend Wendy Haller (Mary Tyler Moore) to help her come to terms with her diagnosis, and in doing so, helps her open up to others. Soon she has a small but solid group of friends and relatives there with her as she fights against cancer.

The Last Best Year originally aired on ABC in November of 1990, just at the beginning of the golden era of made-for-TV movies, and was well-received by critics on its release. That said, Ken Tucker’s review makes a good point: it’s fantasy to the point of improbability, and for most people faced with terminal illness, they don’t get pat resolutions or unlimited financial and emotional support.

Have you ever wondered what happens to the other patients of the doctors in these films? Wendy spends so much time with Jane that I can’t imagine she has time for anyone else.

It’s how we would want to deal with terminal illness if we had the choice, and somehow Jane has that choice, though there is never any explanation why. In real life, how do you even explain something like that? You don’t. In cinema, however, there is always some kind of explanation, usually that the person in question is deserving of a reprieve from death or, at the least, a good death. The Last Best Year is somewhat refreshing in that it doesn’t bother with that kind of insincerity: Jane gets a good year which may be her last, and here it is.

Last Best Year also hints heavily at the toll terminal illness takes on the supporters and survivors. Wendy is reluctant to help Jane at first because of her own personal issues; when she was five, her father became seriously ill and was locked away in a room where she was unable to visit him, and only saw him again at his funeral months later. Wendy holds some resentment against her mother (Dorothy McGuire in her final film role) for this, to the point of hallucinating while visiting Jane in the hospital.

Actually filmed in Missouri! I can’t tell you what town this is despite spending way too much time trying to find out. It’s a small town located just off the river, best I can tell. Hermann, maybe? Parkville? Boonville? The odd thing is that Jane is later seen driving away on what looks to be Highway 17 near the vast metropolis of Eugene, MO, population 168, but the town isn’t Eugene, and that junction isn’t near any river at all. Why would they drive a few hours away just to get this shot? More Missouri stuff: Jane, a small-town Missouri girl who makes it big in Chicago, pronounces “Missouri” in the Colonel Potter “Mizzur-uh” manner, but doesn’t say it right, which made me chuckle. You gotta really be convinced of that “uh” or you can’t pull it off.

The recently departed and still-missed Mary Tyler Moore gives a really great performance in The Last Best Year, the kind of performance that makes you regret she didn’t do more on the silver screen. She would go on to do the television movie sensation Stolen Babies a few years later and earn raves, again, and a few years after that, Flirting With Disaster, which again got raves, all deserved. She’s given a real no-nonsense look in Last Best Year that matches her demeanor, and within a few minutes, you forget you’re watching Mary Tyler Moore.

Bernadette Peters, who I love — let’s face it, who everybody loves — isn’t given much of anything, which is a shame. She’s somewhat typically drawn in that she’s the unhappy career woman with the married boyfriend who dumps her the second she’s inconvenient, but she’s also very quiet, subdued and shy, which is an odd thing for the typical Unhappy Career Woman™ character. The only time she gets even close to angry is when it’s suggested she sees a therapist; when she begins to have dinner nights with her secretary Amy (Erika Alexander), she’s astonished at the kinds of things friends tell each other, apparently because she’s never had friends.

Have you ever seen a shy, friendless career woman who’s out to wreck marriages before? Neither have I, and it’s that kind of characterization in the film that really makes it work. As John Leonard wrote in his New York Magazine review, The Last Best Year is all about manipulating you with its tearjerker tropes. And boy, does it jerk those tears, but it’s also interesting and different enough to make you perfectly happy to cry on cue.

It’s also a little weird. Some of Jane’s nightmares resemble a Celine Dion-slash-Meat Loaf video. That’s not a complaint; I actually like it.

Olive Films has just released The Last Best Year on DVD in a fantastic print. It’s mostly bare bones but comes with English subtitles that are quite good. Directed by veteran television director John Erman, written by David “Not Without My Daughter” W. Rintels, music by John Morris, who scored and conducted all of Mel Brooks’ 1970s films, and shot by Frank Tidy, responsible for the sleek dazzling veneer in the Chuck Norris classic Code of Silence.